Gesture of Love
by RoxisAngel
Summary: Can stealing be considered a gesture of love? Dimitri thinks so.


_Again, I took lots of creative liberties with Ivan and everybody (especially Yeva), and again, this is mostly fluff I did when I was bored._

* * *

He couldn't believe it. Every single shirt he owned was gone. There was nothing in his dirty laundry, his barely-unpacked suitcase, or the bottom drawers of his dresser, where he kept old clothes he hated but hadn't thrown out yet. So much for getting dressed this morning.

"Christ."

"What happened?" Ivan poked his head into Dimitri's room.

"I have no shirts," Dimitri answered, nudging his suitcase with his foot. He scowled for a moment. "Guess it doesn't matter, though. If I go outside, I'll be wearing a coat anyway."

Ivan walked all of the way into the room now. "Huh," he said. "Who would steal your clothes? I mean, aside from Valentina and the rest of her stalker friends."

"Maybe Grandma, if she wanted a laugh."

The two boys paused, listening to the commotion downstairs. Yeva was currently cursing out Sonya for borrowing red high heels from a friend – red shoes were for whores and the like, apparently, and only Yeva could wear them because she had been a slut when she was younger, but there was no way in hell she was letting her granddaughter be a slut like she had been, even though being a slut was fun and it was how she had met Olena's father, who needed to go to hell because he died before her. Olena intervened and tried to calm her mother down, but that only made Yeva start on Olena and the various asinine things she had done when she was a child, including sitting on the hot stove when she was five and riding her bicycle straight into a tree.

"Have I told you how awesome your grandmother is?" Ivan asked, after Karolina finally managed to separate everyone and quiet her grandmother.

"She's less awesome when she starts throwing things at you," Dimitri said. "But yeah, she's usually pretty awesome."

"Awesome and terrifying. I wouldn't want to be Sonya."

"Me neither," Viktoria said from behind them. The eleven-year-old scuttled through the door and crossed the room to jump up on the bed.

"Why are you hiding up here?" Dimitri asked, pulling on a sweatshirt. Ivan sighed, but Dimitri ignored his friend. "What did you do?"

"I might have had a, um, _dispute_ with a girl on the bus, _possibly_ resulting in a nosebleed and tears," Viktoria said evasively, twisting Dimitri's old quilt in her hands and looking intently at the floor.

"I'll see if I can buy you some time," Dimitri said, closing the bottom drawer of his dresser with his foot. "Come on," he said to Ivan, gesturing at the door. They both left the room.

"Grandma," Dimitri started, "Do you know –"

"Oh! You have your ducky pajamas on!" The old woman's face brightened like a small child's when she saw that her grandson was wearing one of his birthday gifts.

Dimitri looked down, as if to confirm that yes, his pajama bottoms were light blue and had yellow ducks on them. "I like ducks," he said, more to get her off to topic than anything else, "Anyway –"

"Crap, you're really wearing them," Karolina said, coming out of the kitchen, her three-year-old son on her hip. Paul stared, enraptured, at Dimitri's pajama bottoms. He liked ducks too, apparently. "Crap, I don't know where my wallet is."

So maybe Yeva's happiness had less to do with Dimitri liking his present and more to do with getting money. Dimitri sighed and moved on to the living room.

"Mom? Do you know where my shirts are? They've all disappeared."

"All of them?" Olena asked, looking up from her book. "Why?"

"I don't know. I remember packing them, and I also remember that there were t-shirts here, but now everything is missing."

"Huh. Well, at least I know what to get you for Christmas. Just kidding – I already got you your presents." She smiled.

Six months later, when Dimitri was doing some last-minute packing after the graduation ceremony, only a few hours before a plane would take him and Ivan to Moscow, someone knocked on his dorm room's door.

"This is yours," a kid from down the hall said, pushing a cardboard box at him before disappearing.

The box was from his family, from Olena specifically. Inside it was a quilt, made from the t-shirts she had taken from him when he and Ivan had spent Christmas with Olena and the rest of Dimitri's family. There was a pocket in the middle, made from five scraps of cloth – something from Yeva, something from Karolina, something from Sonya, something from Viktoria, and something from Olena herself – and inside the pocket was a note from Yeva that read, "Don't try to kill things bigger than yourself."

Above it, Olena had probably written something, but Yeva had scratched that out, deciding that what she had to say was much more important.


End file.
